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Teaching Philosophy
Although becoming a good teacher always involves learning new lessons, it is also the case that becoming a good teacher often involves the relearning of old lessons. And one of the most important lessons that I find myself learning again and again, learning it differently, in various contexts, is the importance of trust: trust in my own skills, trust in the learning process, and, most importantly, trust in the abilities of my students.
Those of us who do a lot of writing for a living are familiar with that feeling of mild panic that sets in when we feel we don’t have as much time to put into a piece as we feel the nature of the work demands. The same feeling is all too familiar to dedicated teachers, whether K-12 or at the university level. We have a task that is valuable to us personally, made even more so by the fact that we are entrusted with someone else’s understanding, and yet we often feel under-prepared; we feel that there is something else that we could be doing in order to maximize the learning experience for our students. However, in response to this feeling I’ve learned to trust the knowledge base and skills I have acquired through my extensive teacher training, my years of experience, and the further learning opportunities that have been afforded to me through training other teachers. I will probably never shake the feeling that I could be doing more for my students, just as I will probably never be satisfied that I am the best teacher I could be, but this feeling is a positive thing. The occasions where I have actually believed that I was completely in control of the situation and had this "teaching thing" all figured out have in fact been the occasions where things have gone most drastically wrong! Always feeling that I could do more keeps me focused on the needs of my students, sharpens my observations of what is working well and what could be improved, and encourages me to be more creative. This trust in my own abilities won’t, of course, prevent me from making mistakes, but it does give me the confidence that I can learn from them.
Trusting in my own skills also requires that I trust the learning process, at the same time recognizing that the process is unpredictable, and, more often than not, heedless of the arbitrary time limits that we assign to it. I always articulate concrete skills-based learning objectives for my classes and criteria for evaluating where students are in the acquisition process. But just as learning is a process that often moves beyond our explicit teaching objectives, so the failure of learning to meet the criteria we have set up to measure it does not always mean that learning has not taken place. Here also, my experience training teachers has had a profound influence on the way in which I conceive of the learning process. In most educational situations we don’t have the opportunity to see our students verify the value of their learning by putting it into practice. But I get the chance to see the same teachers that I train put that training into practice in their own classrooms, and that experience has taught me a great deal about the sometimes unexpected ways in which learning takes hold; this in turn has led me to rethink the criteria I use to define "successful" teaching.
But the cornerstone of both my trust in myself and my trust in the learning process is my willingness to trust my students' ability to learn and to accept a measure of responsibility for their own education. My classes therefore are organized around an active, experiential model of learning in which students acquire skills through discussions and activities that place a premium upon their past experiences, present needs, and future potential.
In both my literature and composition classes I have three basic objectives: enable students to find something that excites them in their work; improve their interpretative, analytical and expressive skills; and show them that while reading and writing are important for their own sake, they also are vital for their understanding of and participation in society. I am providing them not merely with survival skills, but with the skills that will enable them to maximize their own potential.
At heart I am very much a Horatian teacher: I believe that education should be useful and enjoyable. When I design a course I concentrate not merely upon the skills that I want my students to acquire, but their needs as people to enjoy doing so. I believe the classroom should be a place where students not only feel they have a stake in what they are learning but a stake in how they are learning; and to this end I seek constant feedback from my students. I conduct periodic evaluations, solicit their input on key components of the syllabus and encourage them to create their own essay questions. They need to feel comfortable enough to take risks, make mistakes, and work through their doubts on the way to new levels of understanding.
A great deal of my time is spent working with other teachers to achieve institutional changes that will meaningfully affect the classroom abilities of students following and prior to their admission into university. I therefore count my memberships of the National Council of Teachers of English and the Conference on College Composition and Communication as the most valuable of my professional associations because they allow me to participate in discussion of issues that affect all teachers. For the same reason I have been privileged to participate in the grading of the University of California's Subject A exam in 1996 and 1997, the statewide writing exam that is a key component of the university's admissions procedure. Teachers from a variety of institutions come together in Berkeley not simply to grade exams but to exchange ideas with one another on how to improve student writing. The UCI composition program also conducts a "Mock Subject A" program to familiarize local high schools with UCI’s writing requirements; as a participant in this program I have consulted with high school teachers and conducted classroom visits to local schools.
I am interested not only in influencing the classroom practices of my fellow teachers, but their professional, collegial, and pedagogical practices. Therefore a substantial part of my conferencing and publication work has involved exploring with other teachers the possibilities of collaborative learning/teaching and to break down an entrenched academic resistance in the humanities to this mode of education. An essential part of these collaborations has been an exploration of the potential of new information technologies to improve our teaching and research and to forge new connections between the two activities in ways that will benefit our students.
Trust is central to my teaching, but I’m not blindly optimistic about it as a panacea for every teaching challenge. Indeed, a key aspect of my ongoing teaching development is learning to trust not just well but wisely. Trust is always a risk, often a great risk, but one that yields great rewards for both me and my students.